Cleveland Elections Board Told to Resign

By BOB DRIEHAUS

Published: March 20, 2007

Responding to a series of scandals, Ohio's new secretary of state said Monday that she had demanded the resignation of the entire four-member Elections Board of Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland.

Just last week, in the latest development involving one of those scandals, two former Cuyahoga elections workers were sentenced to the maximum of 18 months in jail for manipulating a preliminary recount of the 2004 presidential election vote. The workers' goal had not been to affect the outcome but rather to avoid a more painstaking task in which all votes would have had to be recounted by hand rather than machine.

''When you have election workers going to prison for election-related offenses, it creates a crisis of confidence,'' the secretary of state, Jennifer L. Brunner, said in announcing that she spoke to the four board members Sunday night to urge them to resign. If they do not do so by Wednesday evening, Ms. Brunner said, she will begin a disciplinary process Thursday morning to force their ouster.

Ms. Brunner was elected in November as part of a near sweep of state offices by Democrats that reversed a Republican lock on statewide posts. The board she seeks to remove has two Democratic and two Republican members, including Robert T. Bennett, chairman of both the board and the Ohio Republican Party.

As of Monday, three of the four members had not decided whether to step down, Ms. Brunner said. But Mr. Bennett said at a news conference that he planned to serve until the expiration of his term in 2010.

''I believe that the secretary of state has hit the wrong target in her attempts to make corrections,'' said Mr. Bennett, who placed blame for the recount-rigging scandal on the Cuyahoga County prosecutor. Mr. Bennett said the prosecutor, William D. Mason, had known of the way the workers intended to approach the recount and had done nothing to stop it. He said he would file a complaint against Mr. Mason with the Ohio Supreme Court's disciplinary counsel.

Efforts to reach Mr. Mason by phone and e-mail on Monday night were unsuccessful.

Ohio's electoral votes were crucial to President Bush's re-election in 2004, though Senator John Kerry won Cuyahoga County with 448,486 votes, compared with Mr. Bush's 221,606. Mr. Kerry gained 17 votes in the county recount, and Mr. Bush lost 6.

But the recount case has hardly been the only problem with elections in the county. Lines at the polls were hours long in 2004, and in the primary election last May, the county's first experience with electronic voting, poll workers were absent or poorly trained, computer cards on which votes had been recorded were lost, and one polling place opened hours late.

Mr. Bennett said the board had made significant progress, however, as evinced by few problems in last November's elections.

Ms. Brunner's demand that the Elections Board's members step down follows by six weeks the resignations of the county's elections director and its deputy director. While an independent search committee seeks candidates to succeed them, the former director, Michael Vu, remains on the county payroll as a consultant, a fact Ms. Brunner said indicated that the board had not undertaken reforms quickly enough.

Photos: Addressing troubles at the polls in Cuyahoga County, Jennifer L. Brunner, Ohio's new secretary of state, is seeking the ouster of the county's Elections Board, led by Robert T. Bennett. (Photo by Michael Houghton for The New York Times); (Photo by Mark Duncan/Associated Press)